The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Network performance monitoring applications usually collect, process and display network information in various formats, such as graphs, charts, panels and other displays. However, the collected and displayed information is usually application-specific, and provides only those network characteristics that were specifically requested by the individual applications. Usually, each application separately collects data and displays the collected data, but none of the applications generates a cross-application view of the network.
Furthermore, data collected by individual network monitoring applications is usually separately searchable and modifiable by the respective individual applications. However, the data sets collected by a multiplicity of applications are typically not linked with each other and do not provide an integrated view of the network.